"Enjoy the spectacle!"
"Enjoy the spectacle!" the TV presenter eagerly tells his audience as Teiresias escapes from his white-coated guards and runs amok in the studio. The words might have come from Liliana Cavani herself, for she tricks out this free-wheeling adaptation of Sophocles’ drama with all kinds of dubious visual diversions, recalling both the outrageous enigmas of late ’60s Pasolini (Theorema, Porcile) and the sex-and-sadism mix of her own Night Porter, made three years later. The setting is modern-day Milan, cowed by a thwarted revolution and ruled by a militarist government (an interpretation also used –with far greater subtlety– in Jean Anouilh’s theatre adaptation, written during the Occupation). But Cavani’s Milan quickly proves as unbelievable as her Nazi-loving Vienna: the colonel’s headquarters simply has a vicious steel gateway and a flimsy bust of Napoleon in a courtyard; Italian and English signs covering the city walls remind people that "REBELS MAKE YOU VOMIT" – hardly surprising, since the rebels in question decoratively stud the streets, dead and rotting. And amongst the corpses stalk Britt Ekland’s Antigone, here remodeled as the archetypal bourgeois rebel who stomps out of a dinner-table row, and Pierre ClŽmenti’s Teiresias – not a blind, revered prophet, but an unkempt figure of myth and mystery first discovered curled up on a seashore. Since Teiresias speaks Ostrogothic, a language known to no one, there can be no discussion of the ways, means and philosophy of revolution; instead the rebel two go about their business silently and tiresomely, in various stages of undress and accompanied by Morricone music. The dawdling pace repeatedly speeds up, however, for scenes of conventional fascist horror: at the Military Department they see army recruits shaved and indoctrinated ("You’re being castrated!" Antigone whispers); in the steam room at the officers’ club, they witness naked men shuffling on all fours beneath the legs of a uniformed boy. With such sensational counter-attractions at hand, Cavani lets Sophocles’ eloquent debate between the virtues of eternal and man-made laws fall by the wayside (though she predictably pounces on Creon’s rabid chauvinism, making great play with Antigone’s disfigurement through beating, and the voyeuristic proclivities of the colonels, who take turns peering through binoculars at her execution). As Cavani offers no debate of her own as substitute, one is left with a bludgeoning, fashion-conscious allegory, shakily built up without any firm intellectual groundwork.

Geoff Brown
"Film Monthly Bulletin", Vol. 42, No. 503, December 1975